ArenaNet Bans 3000 Guild Wars 2 Players For Exploiting ‘Bug’

Guild Wars 2 just hit the MMO scene with its retail release, and already around 3,000 players have been banned for taking advantage of the game’s first widespread exploit.

The glitch was an in-game vendor that players discovered was selling a great weapon at a crazy-low price. So players started buying the weapon in bulk, then breaking it down for crafting materials — and essentially blowing up the game’s fledgling economy.

ArenaNet acted fast and started banning players. The ban is permanent unless players are willing to delete the items they gained from the exploit. If they’ll do that, ArenaNet will cut them some slack and change the ban from “forever” to “72 hours.” Another 500 players were banned for using bots, with those bans lasting 72 hours as well.

Meanwhile, the big surge of players Guild Wars 2 is experiencing — and its player-irritating consequences, like overflow servers — have caused ArenaNet to suspend first-party sales of the game.

For the time being, you can’t purchase Guild Wars 2′s digital version from ArenaNet’s website. In a Facebook post, ArenaNet wrote, “Ensuring the best possible play experience for our fans is our highest priority. We’ve said before that we would be willing to temporarily disable first-party digital sales if we felt our high player concurrency may compromise player experiences. We have now reached that point.”

To be clear, you can still snag Guild Wars 2 at any retailer that normally carries the game. It’s just not available from ArenaNet’s website, with the hopes that that will slow the influx of players and make sure everybody can enjoy the game while ArenaNet adapts to supporting the players already in Guild Wars 2.

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